WAB
Veteran Member
Re: open mic - ruminations
While I did at least dip my pinky toe into the waters of formal publishing, and achieved a very grand level of total obscurity
, I never even came close to reading my poems anywhere. Indeed, I've never even attended a poetry reading.
It isn't as if I declined on invitations, or avoided readings strategically; I was never aware of readings anywhere within miles, nor did I seek them out. To describe my feelings about that accurately, I would have to say that my interest in attending poetry readings is on par with any random person's who detests poetry. I literally have less than zero interest: the interest is in the negative, bordering on revulsion.
Poetry has always been an intensely private thing for me. For one thing, I am an introverted, solitary soul to begin with. I vividly remember poring over the poems in the high school text book I had. I was in my room, on my bed, reading a handful of poems over and over and over: Robert Frost, E.A. Robinson, Tennyson, Shakespeare. I would comb through every line, count syllables, beats, feet, note feminine endings, note metrical substitutions. I had a love affair with the English language, and with poetry, and the names of the great poets were as sacred to me as the names of the saints and martyrs were to the devout. Seriously! That's how it was.
When I heard a recording in the high school library of Ezra Pound reading his famous poem, Sestina: Altaforte, I was aghast at how it sounded. Pound affected some kind of grand oratorical accent, not British, but close. He was born in Idaho. Where did that ridiculous voice come from? I thought. Why would he read like that? It turned me off from ever wanting to hear a poet read their work. You can listen for yourself on YouTube to get a sense of what I'm talking about.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=beju5dJpeds
Remember I said that poetry was intensely private to me; and here I was hearing a vocal rendering of a poem I had read dozens of times, a poem that had its own rhythm and cadence in my own mind, its own particular sound and texture. The reading by Pound had shocked me - that my conception of the rhythm and tone of a poem could be so drastically different than its author's own conception.
Over time, I became a bit more amenable to public readings of poetry. One of the poets I actually enjoy to hear reading his poetry is the late Derek Walcott. He was from St. Lucia, but loved the English language passionately, and paid tribute to it with his excellent poetry. I saw a program on PBS in New York many years ago featuring a few well known poets and some of their readings. I already loved Walcott, but when I heard him read, he salved the wound that Pound had dealt by rendering his poems in a manner commensurate with my own private conception of it.
This has gone too long...
To be continued...
While I did at least dip my pinky toe into the waters of formal publishing, and achieved a very grand level of total obscurity
, I never even came close to reading my poems anywhere. Indeed, I've never even attended a poetry reading.It isn't as if I declined on invitations, or avoided readings strategically; I was never aware of readings anywhere within miles, nor did I seek them out. To describe my feelings about that accurately, I would have to say that my interest in attending poetry readings is on par with any random person's who detests poetry. I literally have less than zero interest: the interest is in the negative, bordering on revulsion.
Poetry has always been an intensely private thing for me. For one thing, I am an introverted, solitary soul to begin with. I vividly remember poring over the poems in the high school text book I had. I was in my room, on my bed, reading a handful of poems over and over and over: Robert Frost, E.A. Robinson, Tennyson, Shakespeare. I would comb through every line, count syllables, beats, feet, note feminine endings, note metrical substitutions. I had a love affair with the English language, and with poetry, and the names of the great poets were as sacred to me as the names of the saints and martyrs were to the devout. Seriously! That's how it was.
When I heard a recording in the high school library of Ezra Pound reading his famous poem, Sestina: Altaforte, I was aghast at how it sounded. Pound affected some kind of grand oratorical accent, not British, but close. He was born in Idaho. Where did that ridiculous voice come from? I thought. Why would he read like that? It turned me off from ever wanting to hear a poet read their work. You can listen for yourself on YouTube to get a sense of what I'm talking about.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=beju5dJpeds
Remember I said that poetry was intensely private to me; and here I was hearing a vocal rendering of a poem I had read dozens of times, a poem that had its own rhythm and cadence in my own mind, its own particular sound and texture. The reading by Pound had shocked me - that my conception of the rhythm and tone of a poem could be so drastically different than its author's own conception.
Over time, I became a bit more amenable to public readings of poetry. One of the poets I actually enjoy to hear reading his poetry is the late Derek Walcott. He was from St. Lucia, but loved the English language passionately, and paid tribute to it with his excellent poetry. I saw a program on PBS in New York many years ago featuring a few well known poets and some of their readings. I already loved Walcott, but when I heard him read, he salved the wound that Pound had dealt by rendering his poems in a manner commensurate with my own private conception of it.
This has gone too long...
To be continued...
.